DEI is Community and Community is DEI
Community at its core is inclusive of diverse perspectives. DEI strives to create belonging and community. You can’t have one without the other. These principles inherently work together to serve people on a very personal level in a very human way.
Where does it start?
Being intentionally inclusive
It’s important to be intentionally inclusive in all community content and programming.
It starts with your champions and your moderators. If your champions are creating content and programming, it’s important to include a broad range of perspectives. It’s important to have representation from all demographics of your community. Lately, I’ve been hearing from community builders how difficult it is to recruit diverse perspectives when the industries we support may not be incredibly diverse themselves. But, that’s why being intentional is even more important. Every perspective should be represented to make every person feel like their voice is being heard in industry and community discussions.
Diversity extends to moderation. The individuals moderating your community spaces should bring different perspectives and be sensitive to a variety of different cultures. This makes context and interpretation much easier to decipher. Having a broad perspective helps us relate better to others which tends to help us be more empathetic. This is a vital part of moderation teams. I serve as a moderator for multiple online communities in addition to my “day job” as a community builder. With the exception of spam, I never make any decisions about removing content without sending the content to the broader group to discuss and see what everyone thinks the action should be once a post has been flagged. This is such an important part of moderation. There needs to be a diverse team reviewing content and making decisions with the best interest of the community at heart.
Moderation
This is a great segway to my next point. Moderation is a huge part of DEI and online communities.
I recently became familiar with the “Paradox of Tolerance.” The Paradox is attributed to Plato’s defense of "benevolent despotism" as it is defined in ``The Open Society and Its Enemies.” It was philosopher Karl Popper who started using this term. If you are not familiar with the paradox, I encourage you to look into it further, because this short blog post will not do it justice.
Generally, the principle is that tolerance of the intolerant can create intolerance. Being tolerant is not always an act of tolerance if it allows intolerance. I find this really fascinating in applying it to communities and moderation. It’s a very complicated paradox that I believe applies very much to DEI principles and moderation. It’s really important to enforce guidelines so members can feel safe. Guidelines are an important part of DEI initiatives.
Having community guidelines is so important when trying to create safe community spaces. At my organization, our community guidelines were written collaboratively by our champions in the community. They did a fantastic job in including DEI in the guidelines and it makes it so much easier to encourage and enforce safe dialogue because of the foundation they laid.
Here is an example from our code of conduct: “Respect those of different backgrounds, ethnicities, ages, and genders to your own, especially when you disagree with a comment. Do not disparage another’s experience because it does not match your own. For example, posts against minority-owned firms or programs, comments that perpetuate stereotypes, and comments painting entire generations in a negative light are not permitted.”
These rules clearly state that the community is meant to encourage respectful dialogue of people with all different perspectives. That’s what DEI is all about and that is what community is all about! It’s the same goal and purpose. Connecting all people to make them feel included and belong!
Power of connection
Community building is about bringing people together. People are generally drawn together by commonalities, a community building skill is being able to identify commonalities that aren’t utterly apparent. An example would be introducing Jake and Christina because they both spend their weekends competing in triathlons. These commonalities may have nothing to do with why they joined your association's community. However, it’s something that can bring them together and unite people that normally may think they don’t have much in common.
In conclusion
Community is diversity, equity and inclusion and DEI is community. I encourage every community builder to be intentionally inclusive, moderate fairly, and bring people together.
I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this important topic!